Discovering the ethnic name and the genealogical tie in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club - Articles

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1998 by Zenobia Mistri

These fears on the part of the mothers are the fears that the genealogical chain that links up with the foundational world of the ancestors will be broken. All the mothers have their memories of the past. Boelhower explains: "... it is not a question here of the ethnic subject living in the past but as Sowell says (1981:273), of the past living in him" (90).

These matrilineal fears compound in the book until the last section, where each mother reaches out and forcibly links up with her daughter, showing her the strength she needs to take from her mother and her mother's mother before her. Like women warriors, each mother takes up the challenge and meets it head on. Even timid Ying-ying St. Clair comes forth like the tiger between the trees to rescue her lost daughter. This metaphor of being part of the life substance of their daughters appears in each of the mother's stories.

Werner Sollors sees ethnicity as constructed from the conflict of what he calls issues of "consent and descent." Sollors does not make distinctions among the ethnic groups. Unlike him, I see consent and descent as applicable only to those ethnic groups, like most Asian Americans, who have chosen to immigrate to the United States. For Sollors, consent is the conscious choice an individual makes in deciding to become an American while descent is the tie to the place of one's origin. Sollors suggests the dynamics of ethnicity set in motion when descent and consent are in conflict and when the group fears for its survival (Sollors 6).

This theme of not understanding the mothers echoes through the daughters' stories. But it is June Woo who goes to the marrow of the issue in the last story of this cycle. She feels her bones ache with a familiar pain when the train leaves the Hong Kong border and enters China. She recalls her mother's words: "Once you are born Chinese, you cannot help but feel and think Chinese.... It is in your blood waiting to be let go" (Tan 267). Now on the train she dreams and imagines. Boelhower explains that without imagination there can be no project. He theorizes significant ethnic experiences in ethnic fiction as being generated from a cultural encyclopedia: "When the parents die, their cultural inheritance is passed on to the children; only now they must practice a politics of memory in order to piece together the original patrimony" (100).

June imagines her sisters' letter to their mother and slowly recovers her Chinese past through pieces of her father's stories coupled with remembering stories her mother had told her; these enable her to weave her generational story all the way back to China. Boelhower calls this a memnotechnical strategy of recovery. Here, June chooses to splice memory with the project at hand, which requires her to go forward.

The journey Jing-mei/June undertakes is organized geographically in the text; she goes from San Francisco to Hong Kong, to Shenshen, China, to Guangzhon to Shanghai. Yet, while it is organized geographically, there is a parallel journey being reconstructed for Jing-mei through her mother's and father's stories and recollections. This geographical journey undertaken by her parents in 1949 is recalled and brought back to her as she goes to China for the first time. Both stories--her parents' in the past, and hers in the present--serve to underscore and trace her mother's flight from Kweilin to Chungking, to Shanghai, to Canton, to Hong Kong, to Haiphong, and finally to San Francisco. As Boelhower might explain this: "here the goal is to interpret the past, not the past itself" (104).